Best of 2025: Apple Buys Styra Brains, OPA Remains Open
Cloud Native Now, Monday, December 29th, 2025
In what may be the most Apple-esque move in recent memory - quiet, strategic, and totally on-brand - the tech giant has apparently executed an 'acquihire without the acquisition' by scooping up the co-founders and core team behind Styra, the original creators of Open Policy Agent (OPA). While Apple isn't acquiring Styra outright, the impact is arguably just as seismic.
OPA, for those unfamiliar, is a powerful open source policy engine that has become a foundational layer in the cloud-native stack, allowing developers and operators to write and enforce policies across Kubernetes, APIs, microservices, and more. It's Rego-based, declarative, and flexible enough to plug into nearly any part of your software delivery pipeline. In short: If you care about policy-as-code and cloud-native governance, OPA has probably crossed your radar.
Styra, the company behind OPA, not only created and maintained the open source project, but also commercialized it with a suite of enterprise-grade tooling around policy authoring, compliance auditing, and runtime enforcement. Their platform, Styra DAS (Declarative Authorization Service), was a go-to for teams looking to scale OPA across complex architectures.